Al-Darb Diya is Arabic, meaning "The Shining Avenue". DDMA is my news blog on blogspot. It started on the second of January 2009. This blog contains certain news articles that I chose to put on here. Some of my own individual news articles might appear here. Hostile, negative and spam comments would be rejected. Most of the posts are NOT written by me, and some have the link to where I got them from originally. I welcome people to ask me to post any other news they don't find on DDMA.

DDMA Headline Animator

Monday, March 14, 2016

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland will challenge the findings of an international human rights commission which is expected to deliver a scathing assessment of democratic backsliding in the European Union's largest ex-communist member state, the foreign minister said Thursday.

Witold Waszczykowski said the government plans to dispute the findings of the Venice Commission, an arm of the Council of Europe human rights group. The commission is scheduled to deliver its report on Friday in Venice.

A leaked draft of the report was strongly critical of Poland's government. "I won't hide the fact that we plan to dispute this opinion," Waszczykowski said in a radio interview. He said members of a Polish delegation who will travel to Venice to meet with the commission members "will disprove the charges."

Poland has been in a state of political crisis since the conservative Law and Justice came to power in November on a mission to build a strong state that promotes patriotic and traditional Catholic values.

Since taking office, the government has enacted sweeping reforms to some of the country's state bodies, including changes to the Constitutional Tribunal. In December, parliament changed legislation concerning the functioning of the tribunal, affecting its ability to review legislation.

The crisis deepened on Wednesday when the same court declared those changes to be unconstitutional, but the government of Prime Minister Beata Szydlo said it would ignore the judgment. Protests have been taking place in the past two days, including one Wednesday evening in which activists used a projector to put the court's ruling in big letters across the building of Szydlo's office. A larger rally is planned for Saturday.

Some of Law and Justice's legislative changes have put Poland at odds with the U.S. and the European Union, which has opened a procedure of checking whether the changes respect the 28-nation bloc's principle of the rule of law.

Though not legally binding, the Venice Commission's findings are expected to influence the separate EU investigation into Poland. According to a draft report that was leaked in late February, the commission declared that "as long as the Constitutional Tribunal cannot carry out its work in an efficient manner, not only is the rule of law in danger, but so is democracy and human rights."

It's not clear if the final report will differ significantly from the draft report, but the turmoil surrounding the court has only grown in the meantime given the government's insistence that the court's rulings won't be published, something required for them to become binding.

Kamila Gasiuk-Pihowicz, a lawmaker and spokeswoman with the opposition Modern party, said Law and Justice must now decide whether to take the "path back to democracy and the rule of law" or "the path of anarchy, chaos and lawlessness."

In recent days the government has spoken harshly about protesters and the court. The foreign minister also said Thursday that the court's chief judge, Andrzej Rzeplinski, "is starting to remind me of an Iranian ayatollah."

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland will challenge the findings of an international human rights commission which is expected to deliver a scathing assessment of democratic backsliding in the European Union's largest ex-communist member state, the foreign minister said Thursday.

Witold Waszczykowski said the government plans to dispute the findings of the Venice Commission, an arm of the Council of Europe human rights group. The commission is scheduled to deliver its report on Friday in Venice.

A leaked draft of the report was strongly critical of Poland's government. "I won't hide the fact that we plan to dispute this opinion," Waszczykowski said. He said members of a Polish delegation who will travel to Venice to meet with the commission members "will disprove the charges."

Poland has been in a state of political crisis since the conservative Law and Justice came to power in November on a mission to build a strong state that promotes patriotic and traditional Catholic values.

Since taking office, the government has enacted sweeping reforms to some of the country's state bodies, including changes to the Constitutional Tribunal. In December, parliament changed legislation concerning the functioning of the tribunal, affecting its ability to review legislation.

The crisis deepened on Wednesday when the same court declared those changes to be unconstitutional, but the government of Prime Minister Beata Szydlo said it would ignore the judgment. Some of Law and Justice's legislative changes have put Poland at odds with the U.S. and the European Union, which has opened a procedure of checking whether the changes respect the 28-nation bloc's principle of the rule of law.

Though not legally binding, the Venice Commission's findings are expected to influence the separate EU investigation into Poland. According to a draft report that was leaked in late February, the commission declared that "as long as the Constitutional Tribunal cannot carry out its work in an efficient manner, not only is the rule of law in danger, but so is democracy and human rights."

It's not clear if the final report will differ significantly from the draft report, but the turmoil surrounding the court has only grown in the meantime.

BERLIN (AP) — Germany's leading politicians are mulling the fallout from state elections that brought gains for a nationalist, anti-migration party and two major disappointments for Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives.

The three-year-old Alternative for Germany, or AfD, powered into three state legislatures Sunday after campaigning against Merkel's liberal immigration policy. Merkel's party also lost two states they had hoped to win back from center-left incumbents, with victory going to governors who often sounded more enthusiastic about her migrant approach than her own candidates.

Germany's parties were holding meetings Monday to digest the outcome, which featured tricky results for most established political forces. Germany's European commissioner Guenther Oettinger, a member of Merkel's Christian Democrats, told the Funke newspaper group that "it would be wrong to bring about a change of course now" on migrants.

BOSTON (AP) — Just in time for St. Patrick's Day, genealogical research website Ancestry.com is making 10 million Catholic parish records from Ireland — some dating to 1655 — available online for free to help people trace their Irish heritage.

The goldmine of information, available without cost for a week starting Friday, includes baptism, confirmation, marriage, and burial records from more than 1,000 parishes in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

"This will really help people reconstruct their family story," said Lisa Elzey, a family historian at Ancestry, which now offers access to 55 million Irish records. "There's all kinds of mysteries within these records."

More than 33 million Americans claimed Irish ancestry in 2014, according to the latest U.S. Census data, or about 10 percent of the nation's population. The documents, usually in English but sometimes in Latin, and dating from 1655 to 1915, had already been digitized by the National Library of Ireland, but Ancestry took the information and indexed it, making it possible to do much quicker and more efficient searches using names, places and dates.

The trove contains information on prominent Irish citizens as well as the forebears of famous Irish-Americans. Included is the 1828 marriage record, in Latin, of President John F. Kennedy's great-great-grandparents: Edmundus FitzGerald and Maria Lenihan.

The records also include baptism records of author James Joyce and Irish-born White House designer James Hoban. They tell not only the stories of Irish families, but help explain the cultural and religious fabric of the island, said the Rev. Oliver Rafferty, a professor of history and Director of Irish Programs at Boston College.

The older records in particular, he said, are fragmented. "There are enormous gaps in Catholic records, especially the older ones, much of it because of the periodic persecution of Catholics at various stages of Irish history," he said.

The records from parishes in the towns tend to be more complete that those from churches in remote rural areas, said Rafferty, who is familiar with the records because of their availability from the national library.

Perusing the documents can help researchers make connections through maiden names, godparents' names, and marriage witnesses' names. "It's absolutely key to look at things like witnesses and to study the people around a family in order to build context and the bigger picture," said Michal Brophy, a Massachusetts-based member of the Association of Professional Genealogists, who says Irish-American research is one of his specialties.

BERLIN (AP) — A nationalist, anti-migration party powered into three German state legislatures in elections Sunday held amid divisions over Chancellor Angela Merkel's liberal approach to the refugee crisis. Merkel's conservatives lost to center-left rivals in two states they had hoped to win.

The elections in the prosperous southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, neighboring Rhineland-Palatinate and relatively poor Saxony-Anhalt in the ex-communist east were the first major political test since Germany registered nearly 1.1 million people as asylum-seekers last year.

The three-year-old Alternative for Germany, or AfD — which has campaigned against Merkel's open-borders approach — easily entered all three legislatures. AfD won 15.1 percent of the vote in Baden-Wuerttemberg and 12.6 percent in Rhineland-Palatinate, official results showed. It finished second in Saxony-Anhalt with some 24 percent, according to projections by ARD and ZDF television with most districts counted.

"We are seeing above all in these elections that voters are turning away in large numbers from the big established parties and voting for our party," AfD leader Frauke Petry said. They "expect us finally to be the opposition that there hasn't been in the German parliament and some state parliaments," she added.

There were uncomfortable results both for Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union and their partners in the national government, the center-left Social Democrats. The traditional rivals are Germany's two biggest parties.

"The democratic center in our country has not become stronger, but smaller, and I think we must all take that seriously," said Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, the Social Democrats' leader. Merkel's party kept its status as strongest party in Saxony-Anhalt. It had hoped to beat left-leaning Green governor Winfried Kretschmann in Baden-Wuerttemberg, a traditional stronghold that the CDU ran for decades until 2011. It also hoped to oust Social Democrat governor Malu Dreyer from the governor's office in Rhineland-Palatinate.

However, the CDU finished several percentage points behind the popular incumbents' parties in both states and dropped 12 percentage points to a record-low result in Baden-Wuerttemberg, with 27 percent support. Its performance in Rhineland-Palatinate, with 31.8 percent, was also a record low.

The Social Democrats suffered large losses in both Baden-Wuerttemberg and Saxony-Anhalt, where they were the junior partners in the outgoing governments, finishing behind AfD. Other parties won't share power with AfD, but its presence will complicate their coalition-building efforts.

In all three states, the results were set to leave the outgoing coalition governments without a majority — forcing regional leaders into what could be time-consuming negotiations with new, unusual partners. Merkel's CDU still has a long-shot chance of forming an untried three-way alliance to win the Baden-Wuerttemberg governor's office.

Germany's next national election is due in late 2017. While Sunday's results will likely generate new tensions, Merkel herself should be secure: she has put many state-level setbacks behind her in the past, and there's no long-term successor or figurehead for any rebellion in sight.

A top official with Merkel's party called for it to stay on its course in the migrant crisis. CDU general secretary Peter Tauber pointed to recent polls indicating that her popularity is rebounding and added: "this shows that it is good if the CDU sticks to this course, saying that we need time to master this big challenge."

Merkel insisted last year that "we will manage" the challenge of integrating migrants. While her government has moved to tighten asylum rules, she still insists on a pan-European solution to the migrant crisis, ignoring demands from some conservative allies for a national cap on the number of refugees.

AfD's strong performance will boost its hopes of entering the national parliament next year. It entered five state legislatures and the European Parliament in its initial guise as a primarily anti-euro party before splitting and then rebounding in the migrant crisis.

The CDU may have been hurt by an attempt by its candidates in Baden-Wuerttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate to put cautious distance between themselves and Merkel's migrant policies, which may simply have created the impression of disunity. The party slipped in polls there over recent weeks.

The two last month called for Germany to impose daily refugee quotas — something Merkel opposes but which neighboring Austria has since put in place. Separately, Merkel's conservative allies in Bavaria have attacked her approach for months, demanding an annual refugee cap.

Center-left incumbents Kretschmann and Dreyer often sounded more enthusiastic about Merkel's refugee policy than their conservative challengers. "The result hopefully will be that the CDU and (their Bavarian allies) will realize that this permanent quarreling doesn't help them," Vice Chancellor Gabriel said.

PARIS (AP) — Left-wing European leaders tried to forge a common front Saturday in the continent's migrant crisis while right-wing and extreme right groups protested current policies toward the waves of people fleeing war and poverty.

The meetings and demonstrations came as thousands of migrants have massed in muddy camps in the Greek border town of Idomeni after countries across the Balkans closed their borders. Europe's migrant crisis is forming the backdrop for key elections in three German states Sunday. The Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, is expected to make gains amid unease over Chancellor Angela Merkel's welcome last year for large number of refugees. However, German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said Saturday that gains for the nationalist party won't change his government's stance.

"There is a clear position that we stand by: humanity and solidarity. We will not change our position now," said Gabriel, speaking after a meeting with European leaders in Paris. But in Berlin, about 2,000 right-wing demonstrators carrying German flags chanted "Merkel must go!" and "We are the people!" in a protest Saturday, accompanied by a heavy police escort.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said the meeting of left-wing politicians made progress on a common progressive front to tackle the migrant crisis and called the rise of extreme-right forces the "real threat" to Europe.

Earlier Saturday in northern France, extreme right-wing youths torched tires and blocked migrants from roads in the port of Calais, leading to several arrests. And in Sweden, police said two fires overnight damaged planned shelters for unaccompanied minor migrants.

European leaders face complex negotiations shortly on a deal to send migrants back to Turkey. In exchange, European countries would take in Syrian war refugees currently in Turkey. Some have criticized Germany, which has taken in the majority of the more than 1 million migrants who have entered Europe over the past year, for dominating the discussions.

French President Francois Hollande on Saturday urged more "clarification and transparency" in the discussions with Turkey. Hollande also said "there must be protection of the external borders" of Europe to avoid the re-establishment of new internal borders in Europe's travel-free zone.

Austria's interior minister said her country is getting ready to reinforce controls at more border crossings if migrants seek new routes into Western Europe. Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner also told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper it would be wrong to assume that mass migration into Europe is already over.